The young fellow, with an astuteness that promised well for the rise of his house, was spending the summer with a Magdalen undergraduate, an old Harrow schoolfellow—a young lord whose father was in the Cabinet; in fact, Horace, with airy cheerfulness, was cementing friendships that might be of value to his father in the political life which he was contemplating for himself, and later on for his son.
The millionaire hungered for the lad; and, in his absence, he poured into Betty’s ears all his hopes for him, his pride in him, his affection for him.
And it was good to see that his pride in the lad’s aristocratic ways was wholly undamped by any suspicion that the boy despised him—whereas with his girls he felt their despisings at every turn.
Betty had hoped, for his father’s sake, that the youth would come home for a few days before his term began at Oxford; but when he came she endured her severest trial.
Horace Malahide, fresh from the society of well-bred people, at once found himself at ease with Betty. His bright wit, his airy love of life, his frank ways, his affection and his care for his father, his patience and his delicacy in correcting him, won the esteem of the girl. And she, for a day or so, not knowing the attraction of her own beauty, enjoyed his companionship.
She realized, all at once, that he was ignoring his sisters. She found it impossible to withdraw herself from the position. Her sudden avoidances of him inflamed the youth’s desire for her companionship. He became a trial to her.
Then came letters sad with sighs. How the young dogs all take to the same water!
She found a fragment of the poetic pinned to her dressing-table, in which fragment was much rhyming of Modeyne with “I ween,” and tributes to “dainty shoulders chill, and cruel with disdainings keen,” and complaints of “ignorings of worship that any beauty who, less proud of mien, had been, must surely needs have seen.”
The dictionary had been ransacked for rhymes.
The lad was in the euphemistic stage of poetic debauchery; and Betty could never abide indifferent verse. He chose the surest way to this very desert of ignorings and shoulders chill and the like disdainings. The devil was in it for the lad all through.